Online marketing, for example, through mobile advertising, has become a popular way for advertisers to reach consumers that may be interested in the products and services offered by those advertisers. Like other advertising media, online advertising frequently involves both publishers who integrate advertisements into their online content, and advertiser who provide such advertisements. These publishers can include, for example, website providers (e.g., news outlets) and streaming media services. Often, publishers provide content as a free service (e.g., a news service or a music service) and rely on hosting of advertisements in order to remain profitable.
One problem with conventional methods of online advertising is that such advertisements do not provide useful feedback to the advertisers that can be used to further develop their products and services. Nor do conventional methods of online advertising provide useful feedback to the advertisers that can be used to further develop their advertisements, or further target such advertisements to users who are likely to be interested in their products and services. For example, conventional methods of tracking such advertisements rely on metrics such as cost per action or cost per click, which at best indicate that the user somehow acknowledged the advertisement rather than indicating that the user has a positive or negative opinion of the advertised content.
Another problem with conventional methods of online advertising is that such advertisements do not provide a convenient way of engaging the user. Such advertisements can be disruptive to the user's activity (e.g., by forcing the user to watch all or at least part of a video advertisement before the user can continue their desired activity on the device). These types of disruptive advertisements can lead to annoyance and resentment on the part of the user toward publishers and advertiser. Alternatively, such advertisements can be more passive (e.g., a banner advertisement at the top of a webpage). Unfortunately, such passive advertisements are easy for the user to ignore and avoid interacting with. Moreover, in neither of these cases (i.e., disruptive or passive advertising) does the user feel that he or she has a personal stake in the advertisement.